Go to the tuner tab while it is running. When it says locked it will also have a number next to it. If it goes over 4 I would get another dongle.
What does the 4 / the number indicate?
Just a generic number in my system, I have seen 5 and even 6 but just to have the extra capacity I have an extra. I wouldn't have known I needed the extra if I didn't have it. lol
So a generic number told you that you needed more dongles? Can you explain the working principle?
The number that shows
locked in the tuners tab represents the number of freqs the dongle is actively seeing depending on if its a single channel or a trunked system.
If you start one NBFM freq, the number will remain at one while there is signal and not change at until you lose signal or start another channel or system in the range the dongle covers. If your just monitoring the one freq it would never display anything higher than 1.
If your on a trunked system, with good signal, it will always say one, because its locked on the control channel. Then each time a tg you have selected to listen or record becomes active on a voice freq in the system, the number will go up. It relates to "Max Traffic Channels. If yours is set to 3 traffic channels, your locked value will never exceed 4. 1 cc and 3 active voice channels. This is all based on one dongle.
When it shows 1 locked
its because it's just sitting on the cc with no active active voice channels.
Sdrtrunk wiki
- Channels indicates how many channels are being sourced from the tuner. A value of 0 (UNLOCKED) will be displayed when the tuner is not sourcing any channels. A non-zero value, for example: 1 (LOCKED), indicates the number of channels being sourced from the tuner. The LOCKED label indicates that the tuner editor's frequency and sample rate controls are locked and cannot be changed by the user until all of the decoding channels being sourced by the tuner have been stopped.
SDRs are capable of sourcing many radio channels simultaneously, limited only by the bandwidth (ie sample rate) of the SDR and the supported frequency range(s). sdrtrunk manages SDRs as a pooled set of resources. When the application allocates new radio traffic channels, it simply iterates through the set of SDRs until it finds an SDR that is capable of tuning the requested channel frequency.
I am running 2 dongles on 3 systems and each system is set to 10 Max Traffic Channels. So in essence I can record 30 tg's at once. Might be taxing on an older pc. It totally bogs down my 12 year old win 7.
North Carrollton site is 771.13125 - 773.81875. This is 2.68750Mhz. This exceeds the 2.4Mhz bandwidth provided by one RTL-SDR dongle. 2 dongles wound be recommended to monitor the North Carrollton site.
A single Airspy mini would work on that also. Not sure about other dongles and their sample rates but I do go over the 2.4 limit on a site that spans 2.4375. My NooElec running @ 2.56 handles it just fine.
